Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Yeah, good luck with that one. The Australian News service is reporting on Ken Ham's efforts to prove that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. They write:

Together with creation scientist Dr. David Menton, Mr Ham says he will soon publish findings that he suggests will be world-changing — and dispel current evidence that dinosaurs roamed the earth over 65 million years ago.

It is understood Mr Ham will claim that a bunch of donated Edmontosaurus bones are only a few thousand years old, based on the fact that they still contain remnants of bone marrow.

Soft tissue surviving in dinosaur bones isn’t an entirely new idea — a Tyrannosaurus Rex bone with soft tissue still present was discovered a decade ago.

Given David Menton's inability to get the basic science correct in his review of human origins, I am not convinced this endeavor will be any more fruitful. The authors take a well-deserved swipe at Mr. Ham's methodology with this, however:

Mr Ham has asserted that scientists cannot claim to have proof of their theories if they weren’t there at the time to observe those theories in action.

Bafflingly, in a new post on the pro-creationism website Answers In Genesis, Ken Ham now asserts that Dr. David Menton can indeed look at fossilised dinosaur bones and determine things that happened before either of them was born — as long as it supports his own ideas.

As Ham writes on the Creation Museum website: "'If Dr. Menton finds what he is looking for, you can count on a big write-up for Answers in Genesis in the near future!'

And with one quote, Ken Ham reveals that neither he nor David Menton have the slightest idea how science works. If you already know what you are looking for, why do the analysis in the first place? And what if you don't find what you are looking for? Then what. Hide the data?

The problem that I have is that, if Ken Ham were trying to show this and displaying a spirit of love, a la "we think that we can show that T. rex lived at the same time as humans with these data," then I would be more charitable. But he doesn't. He displays, instead, along with David Menton, a spirit of haughtiness and expresses nothing but derision toward mainstream palaeontologists.

5 comments:

This particular media report is very dodgy ie it appears to make up 'facts'. For once, Ham has some justification in complaining about it as far as I can see (assuming that he and Menton don't later do exactly what is being alleged of them):https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2015/05/27/who-holds-media-accountable/

I've commented as follows under the link posted by Anonymous:""The simplest explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs is by attributing their demise to the flood described in Genesis 6 and 7". Genesis - if you believe it to be 'history' - makes very clear that the Flood was NOT an extinction event. Nor was any animal that was apparently represented on Noah's ark meant to then go extinct post-flood (Genesis 8: 17)."